Diffbot
Turn the web into a structured database
What is Diffbot?
How to Use Diffbot
Getting started with Diffbot is quick and requires no upfront commitment. Follow these steps to sign up for a free account, get your API token, and make your first data extraction call.
Create your free account
Visit diffbot.com and click 'Get Started for Free'. No credit card is required—you'll instantly receive 10,000 credits to begin experimenting with Diffbot's APIs and data extraction capabilities.
Obtain your API token
After logging in, navigate to the Dashboard section. Here you'll find your unique API token, which authenticates all your requests. Copy this token and keep it secure—you'll use it in every API call.
Make your first API request
Use the Extract API to pull structured data from any webpage. Send a GET request to https://api.diffbot.com/v3/article with your token and target URL. You'll receive a JSON response with the article's title, author, publish date, and full text content.
Explore the Knowledge Graph
Try the Knowledge Graph Search API to query Diffbot's pre-crawled database. Search for organizations by industry, retrieve company profiles with revenue and funding data, or find recent news articles on a specific topic—all without crawling a single page yourself.
Diffbot Core Features
Diffbot Use Cases
- 1Market intelligence and competitive analysis: Pull up-to-date organization profiles, funding rounds, and revenue data to track competitors and identify market trends without manual research.
- 2Media monitoring and sentiment analysis: Ingest news and article streams with entity extraction and sentiment scoring to track brand mentions and industry developments in real-time.
- 3E-commerce price and product aggregation: Retrieve product catalogs, images, reviews, and pricing across multiple retailers to build comparison shopping engines or monitor competitive pricing.
- 4Data enrichment for CRM and BI platforms: Enhance existing customer or company records with fresh web-derived attributes like revenue, headcount, social profiles, and recent news mentions.
- 5Academic research and data science projects: Leverage the free tier to collect large-scale structured web data for research papers, market analysis, and training machine learning models.
Pros and Cons of Diffbot
Pros
- Massive pre-crawled dataset covering billions of web pages with structured data ready for immediate use across multiple domains
- No-code extraction eliminates the need to build and maintain custom web scrapers or crawling infrastructure
- Credit-based pricing with a generous free tier that doesn't require a credit card, perfect for prototyping and small projects
- Proven adoption by top-tier companies including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, FactSet, and Snap with robust enterprise support
✕ Cons
- Credit-based pricing model can be confusing for new users and requires careful estimation of per-activity costs before scaling
- Rate limits on the free tier (5 calls per minute) are restrictive for rapid prototyping and large-scale testing scenarios
- No self-hosted or on-premise deployment option, creating full dependency on Diffbot's hosted cloud infrastructure
Diffbot vs Top Alternatives
| Feature | ScrapingBee | Apify | Bright Data |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pre-crawled dataset | No pre-crawled data | Limited pre-crawled datasets | Large proxy network only |
| Credit-based pricing | Usage-based pricing | Usage-based pricing | Subscription-based pricing |
| No-code extraction | Requires custom scraping code | Requires custom actors | Requires manual configuration |
| Free tier | Free tier with 25 API credits | Free tier with $5 monthly usage | No free tier |
Diffbot Pricing
Free
- 10,000 credits/month
- 5 calls/min rate limit
- Unlimited team members
- Dashboard and API access
- Chat/email support
Startup
- 250,000 credits/month
- 5 calls/sec rate limit
- Unlimited team members
- Custom SLA
- Chat/email support
Plus
- 1,000,000 credits/month
- 25 calls/sec rate limit
- 25 active crawls
- 3 user licenses
- Chat/email support
Enterprise
- Bespoke credit allotment
- >25 calls/sec rate limit
- 100+ active crawls
- Custom user licenses
- Premium SLA and managed solutions
Diffbot FAQ
What is Diffbot and how does it work?+
Is Diffbot free to use?+
How does Diffbot's credit-based pricing work?+
What kind of data can I extract with Diffbot?+
Does Diffbot require coding to use?+
How is Diffbot different from traditional web scraping?+
What rate limits does Diffbot impose?+
Diffbot Review — Editor's Score
Who Should Use Diffbot?
Diffbot is ideal for developers, data scientists, market researchers, and businesses that need reliable structured web data at scale. It's particularly well-suited for teams building market intelligence dashboards, media monitoring tools, e-commerce aggregators, or any application that requires up-to-date web data without the overhead of maintaining custom crawling infrastructure.
Diffbot is the most powerful web data extraction platform we've tested, offering a massive pre-crawled dataset and AI-powered extraction that eliminates the need for custom scrapers. Its credit-based pricing and generous free tier make it accessible for small projects, while enterprise-grade features handle the biggest data needs. The main downsides are the learning curve around credit costs and the lack of a self-hosted option.
- World's largest automated Knowledge Graph with 246M+ company profiles
- AI-powered extraction that understands any web page structure automatically
- Generous free tier with 10,000 monthly credits and no credit card required
- Trusted by 400+ companies including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, and Snap
📺 Diffbot Tutorials & Introduction
Diffbot Knowledge Graph Tutorial: Master AI Web Data Extraction ...
Automate Cold Email First Lines with Diffbot & ChatGPT - YouTube
Knowledge Graph Technology Showcase Honest Review - YouTube
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